Costing of service proposals, or offers for services, is fundamental to efficiency of an outsourcing business. In existing data processing outsourcing operations, each new service proposal is formulated as an aggregation of discrete proposal elements. Each proposal element represents a particular component of the overall service to be provided to the customer. When generating a new proposal for a customer, the desired proposal elements are selected, via an operator workstation for example, from a predetermined group of proposal elements stored in the proposal costing system. The entire range of services available to customers can be represented by this predefined group of proposal elements, and individual service proposals can be tailored to customers' needs by selecting appropriate sets of proposal elements from the group.
For each proposal element in the above system, the proposal costing system stores service data indicative of one or more service tasks associated with that proposal element. For example, a given proposal element may represent a specific category or type of service, such as “monitoring a type-X server for 12 months, 24 hours a day,” or “managing a type-Y router for 12 months, 24 hours a day.” The service data for the proposal element then indicates the individual task(s) involved in provisioning of this particular type of service. For example, for the proposal element “managing a type-Y router . . . ,” the tasks indicated by the service data might be:                10 changes of category “low” (corresponding to less than 15 minutes intervention, low skill);        5 changes of category “medium” (corresponding to less than 30 minutes intervention, medium skill); and        2 changes of category “high” (corresponding to less than 60 minutes intervention, high skill). Here, therefore, the service tasks correspond to changes of three different time/complexity categories, with a number of instances specified for each task according to the number of times performance of that task is expected to be required in operation of the service. Whatever the particular tasks, the function of the service data is to provide a convenient basis for costing proposal elements in terms of elementary tasks to which a cost can be attributed. The cost of individual tasks can be based on the execution effort (labour time, complexity, skill level, etc.) and/or any fixed costs associated with a task (fixed service charges, item costs, etc.). Using cost data indicative of such task costs, the proposal costing system can determine the cost of individual proposal elements selected for a new service proposal, and consequently obtain a total cost for the complete proposal.        
At present in such proposal costing systems, the service data used for costing proposal elements is determined heuristically, relying primarily on estimation by a system operator based on past experience of the tasks involved, and may be updated from time to time at the operator's discretion based on documents and information collected via a data collection process based on interviews, workshops, etc. The accuracy of the proposal costing system is thus heavily dependent on the accuracy of estimates made by the operator or operators responsible for setting up and monitoring the system.
Existing maintenance data has been used in some fields for certain types of cost analysis. For example: http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/barkstrom/private/ECS_Maintenance_Cost_Model/Index_to_Cost_of_Maintenance.htm describes use of a software tool which uses inputs from various sources, including data read from an existing database, to provide an estimate of the maintenance costs for a particular system; http://reliability.sandia.gov/Maintenance/Maintenance_Cost/maintenance_cost.html discloses a software tool for deriving a maintenance cost breakdown for machinery from maintenance records; http://www.colesherman.com/whatwedo/systems/tmcm.htm discloses a system which uses accumulated maintenance data from railway track maintenance companies to derive relationships between track maintenance price and track age. These are then used to predict future maintenance prices for contract negotiation purposes. While these systems use existing databases for various maintenance cost analysis purposes, none discloses automatic updating of service data in a proposal costing system as described above in dependence on maintenance data indicative of service tasks performed in operation of real services.